Another British Airways systems failure will cost a fortune in compensation – and reputation

Around 1,500 passengers, I calculate, got up very early this morning to fly on British Airways from Heathrow to Geneva. The same number are waiting at the Swiss airport to come home.

And at least 25,000 more travellers will be affected by the wholesale cancellation of BA’s entire short-haul programme from its main base on Saturday morning.

With trips to the Alps, the Mediterranean and the Canary Islands wrecked, those passengers are unlikely to forget this weekend in a hurry. The reputational damage for BA is rising with every cancellation.

The weekend is unfolding with even more disruption than the IT failure almost exactly two years ago – in the golden days before Covid when BA was a highly profitable airline.

In 2018, hundreds of thousands of credit card payments were “compromised” – with customers told that hackers had accessed their details from the reservations system.

And the previous year, a bank holiday weekend’s worth of flights were wiped out by a system outage that apparently happened during some routine IT maintenance.

“We’re extremely sorry, a number of our flights are disrupted today due to significant technical issues,” passengers are being told once again.

“If we’ve contacted you to say your flight has been cancelled, please don’t go to the airport.”

The 25,000 to 30,000 people who are stranded either at Heathrow or at the other end of cancelled routes remain British Airways’ problem.

The airline says: “We are offering customers on cancelled services options including a full refund and all customers booked to travel on short-haul services from Heathrow today can opt to rebook to a later date for free if they choose.”

But that is rather to understate is obligations under air passengers’ rights rules. BA must pay for alternative flights on rival airlines if that is the only way to get travellers where they need to be on the intended day of travel.

The airline also owes each of the passengers either £220 or £350 in cash compensation, depending on the length of the flight.

“If you think safety is expensive,” the old aviation saying goes, “try having an accident”.

British Airways, along with every other UK airline, invests a huge amount in safety and has an outstanding safety record.

But with yet another weekend’s flying severely damaged by what BA calls “systems disruption”, the airline evidently has a pressing need to invest in its “legacy” computer systems.

At a time when the airline is still losing a prodigious amount of money, it can hardly afford to pay out tens of millions of pounds in recompense for its technical shortcomings. But that is exactly what British Airways faces.